ModernCoinMart.com cashes in the benefits of a security mark

At ModernCoinMart.com, shoppers can browse among rare and special edition coins from around the world priced from under $20 to several thousand dollars.

But a year ago the retailer decided that to convert more shoppers it needed to take extra steps to assure visitors that the site was a secure place to place an order, says chief technology officer Wayne Leiser.

The retailer last year conducted a 30-day test in which half of the site’s 74,890 visitors saw McAfee Inc.’s McAfee Secure security seal on the site, while the other half did not.

The group that saw the seal had a conversion rate 14% higher than the other group, he says. “The A/B testing showed that the McAfee Secure trust mark was beneficial,” Leiser says.

The McAfee Secure seal program, which displays the seal on every page of ModernCoinMart, conducts a daily scan of the site to search for more than 40,000 site vulnerabilities in its infrastructure that could potentially leave the site open to unauthorized access or malicious software that could steal or compromise customer account data.

The program also enables Leiser to log into the McAfee Secure system to view graphical reports detailing the presence of any software code on his site that appears suspicious and needs attention, he says.

Trust marks like McAfee, VeriSign, Truste, Digicert and others are designed to allay the fears of consumers about the security of e-commerce sites. In an August 2012 survey 26% of consumers who do not shop online said they were concerned that their personal information would be used to commit fraud and 21% that their credit or debit card data would be used to commit fraud, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a consulting firm that specializes in the payments industry.

McAfee says the annual cost of its McAfee Secure trustmark is based on the number of domains a merchant operates, and the average number of daily page views, starting at about $700 per year for a merchant with under 1,000 daily page views. Pricing from other security seal vendors cover a wide range, including as low as $229 per year from Trustwave and $1297 per year from Trust Guard.